Belle de Jour called for legalised prostitution as a student

Brooke Magnanti, the scientist who outed herself as the £300-an-hour call girl
Belle de Jour, called for prostitution to be legalised when she was a
20-year-old student.

Dr Brooke Magnanti wrote a letter in support of legalising prostitution before turning to the sex trade herselfPhoto: FACEBOOK

By Gordon Rayner, Chief Reporter

1:07PM GMT 18 Nov 2009

American-born Dr Magnanti, now aged 34, wrote a letter to the St Petersburg Times in Florida in which she said she would not have a "problem" with a family member becoming a prostitute if the trade was legalised.

Seven years after she wrote the letter, she joined an escort agency to help fund her studies after finding she did not have enough money to pay the rent.

She catalogued her experiences in an anonymous blog which later became a bestselling book, The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl, and ITV series starring Billie Piper.

Dr Magnanti, now a researcher into childhood cancers working for Bristol University, wrote to the St Petersburg Times when she was a student at Florida State University, at around the same time that her father Paul had begun using prostitutes after splitting from her mother Susan.

Setting out her argument in favour of legalised brothels, she wrote: "Many people already engage in affairs, and someone married who would seek a prostitute would do so regardless of its legality. Such a person will have to face the consquences of his actions at home - or perhaps in a divorce court...

"If prostitution were legal, I doubt I'd have a problem with family members entering the profession."

Dr Magnanti said at the weekend that she became a prostitute purely for financial reasons, and because she had no moral objection to the concept of "hookerdom".

Her father Paul, however, has admitted his own use of more than 150 prostitutes, some of whom he lived with and introduced to his daugher, might have influenced her thinking.

Mr Magnanti, 60, who lives in Holiday on the west coast of Florida, said meeting prostitutes made his daughter "come to the realisation that prostitutes are just people, it's not the stereotype that people often seem to think it is. They are people with good hearts who have had problems in their lives and have fallen down".

However, he said his use of prostitutes had "hurt" his daughter and led to a falling out between them, as a result of which he and Dr Magnanti have had no contact for three years.

Yesterday Dr Magnanti's mother Susan Levy, who is divorced from her father and works as a nurse in Syracuse, New York, said she supported her daughter "100 per cent" in whatever she chose to do in her life, though she admitted she had been "a little shocked" to discover the truth.